The Loving Dominant

Shortly after moving to New York City, in the early 1990s and beginning to lecture at Eulenspiegel, I thought about “writing a book”. I wanted to write a nonfiction, how-to book for the heterosexual crowd. The lesbians has The Lesbian S&M Safety Manual and the gays had The Leatherman’s Handbook. We didn’t have anything to speak of.

However, I was working as the vice president of a market research company on Madison Avenue and really didn’t have the time. However, on February 19th, 1992. I received an email on the old, pre-Internet system, Prodigy, reading only “I think we share some interests in common.”

Libby and I hit it right off, and in a few months, she asked me to move in with her in Boston and write full time. It took almost a year to write and edit the almost 90,000 words.

That was the easy part.

No one wanted to publish it. No publisher wants to “be the first” on anything. (Little did I know Jay Wiseman’s SM101 was in print on the West Coast. Jay had hit the same problem and gone the self-publishing route.)

Finally, I found a porn company called Masquerade Books looking for a bit of credibility with a bit of nonfiction. They were so unfamiliarwith nonfiction that the first press run had a “erotic fiction” imprint on the spine and a generic cover. These did NOT help sales. It was also in standard paperback size.

A while later, Masquerade came out with a new cover. It was a bit more arty, and if one took out a magnifying class, showed off that this was “a kink book.” I liked it a lot better.

However, in the late 1990s, Masquerade ran into financial difficulties and eliminated its “dead tree” publishing efforts.

Fortunately, for me, Jay Wiseman (remember him?) and his partner, Janet Hardy, had converted the self-publishing effort into a substantial power in the kink publishing field, now called Greenery Press. We talked and a new, improved The Loving Dominant in trade-paperback size appeared.

I loved that cover. The chain, heart and inscription said a lot about what I wanted The Loving Dominant to be about, but time marched on and parts of the book, particularly relating to dating and the Internet were becoming ludicrously out-of-date.

In 2008, a new The Loving Dominant appeared and, for the first time, my darling Libby, who was now my wife, got her long overdue credit. Greenery also published it in digital format.

This is the cover it is currently wearing in bookstores around the world.